Engstrom and Stone on Auto Clubs and the Lost Origins of the Access-to-Justice Crisis @StanfordLaw @YaleLJournal

Nora Freeman Engstrom and James Stone, both of Stanford Law School, are publishing Auto Clubs and the Lost Origins of the Access-to-Justice Crisis in the Yale Law Journal. Here is the abstract.

In the early 1900s, the country’s 1,100 automobile clubs did far more than provide the roadside assistance, maps, and towing services familiar to AAA members of today. Auto clubs also provided, free to their members, a wide range of legal services. Teams of auto club lawyers defended members charged with driving-related misdemeanors and even felonies. They filed suits that, mirroring contemporary impact litigation, were expressly designed to effect policy change. And they brought and defended tens of thousands of civil claims for vehicle-related harm. In the throes of the Great Depression, however, local bar associations abruptly turned on the clubs and filed scores of suits, accusing them of violating nascent legal ethics rules concerning the unauthorized practice of law (UPL). In state after state, the bar prevailed—and, within a few short years, auto clubs’ legal departments were kaput. Drawing on thousands of pages of archival material, this Article recovers the lost history of America’s automobile clubs, as well as their fateful collision with the bar. It then surveys the wreckage and shows that the collision’s impact continues to reverberate throughout the legal profession and law itself. For one, we show how the bar’s litigation campaign against auto clubs—as well as the era’s many other group legal service providers, including banks, unions, and homeowners’ associations—helped establish the so-called “inherent powers doctrine,” which cemented courts (not legislators) as the ultimate arbiters of legal practice regulation. The result was a profound power shift, with the authority to regulate legal services consequentially placed in politically insulated courts, not politically accountable legislators. More practically, the bar’s concerted campaign decimated a once-thriving system for the provision of group legal services to ordinary Americans, which, we argue, ultimately consigned millions of individuals with legal problems to face them alone, or not at all. Finally, in the rise and fall of America’s auto clubs, we find new, untapped evidence that contributes to a range of critical contemporary debates. In particular, our story uncovers fresh evidence to support the value of corporate practice, currently—but controversially—banned by Model Rule 5.4. In the bar’s relentless campaign to shutter auto clubs, not because they harmed members but, rather, because they threatened lawyers’ livelihoods, we unearth direct proof that today’s UPL bans, which continue to stymie the delivery of affordable legal services, have fundamentally rotten roots. And ultimately, we show that the present-day access-to-justice crisis—a crisis that dooms the vast majority of Americans to navigate complex legal processes without any expert assistance—isn’t a product of inattention or inertia. The crisis was, rather, constructed by the legal profession of which we are a part.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

CFP: 2019 Graphic Justice Disuccsions, USC, Queensland, Australia @usceduau @graogu @LexComica

From the emailbox:

2019 Graphic Justice Discussions – “Drawing the Human: Law, Comics Justice”28-29 November 2019, USC, Queensland, Australia The 2019 conference of the Graphic Justice Research Alliance will be hosted by the USC School of Law and Criminology, University of the Sunshine Coast, Queensland Australia. The conference explores the theme Drawing the Human: Law, Comics, Justice and will run on the 28^th and 29^th November 2019. The conference seeks to examine the role of comics, graphic novels and graphic art in constituting as well as critiquing law, rights and justice as they relate to and extend beyond the human. Proposals for papers and panels are welcome from academics, postgraduate students and artists from across a range of disciplines including law, criminology and justice, comics studies, visual and cultural studies and the humanities. Please see the attached call for papers which closes on the 31stof August. We look forward to welcoming you to the Sunshine Coast in November. 

Davies on Love, Understanding, & Justice, and Reading Comic Books

Ross E. Davies, George Mason University, Scalia Law School, and The Green Bag, has published Love, Understanding & Justice at Re-readings III at 1 (2018). Here is the abstract.

The great legal realist Llewellyn, then, thinks we should read and re-read a comic book because of what it can teach us about the significance of love and understanding to the administration of justice. It is a thought (a thought, that is, about love, understanding, and justice, not their exposition in comic books) that does seem to have occurred to at least a few judges and legal scholars. Or at least a few have mentioned it.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

Measure For Measure and the Nature of Justice

Mark Lawson discusses the enduring importance of Shakespeare's Measure for Measure here for the Guardian. He notes,

Not all observers, it’s true, see the play as universal. At the matinee I attended of the Globe production, a large school party was visibly and audibly bemused by the tenacity of Isabella’s defence of her virginity, which includes rebuking her brother, when he wonders if she couldn’t just do this one thing to save his life, with the startling argument: “Is’t not a kind of incest to take life / From thine own sister’s shame?”

But the character’s willingness to be martyr for chastity – and Angelo’s moral crackdown, backed by capital punishment – would seem less quaint to the Tea Party wing of the Republicans, at the Vatican, or in countries and cultures subject to Islamic sharia law. And so the conflict in the Vienna of the play between sexual licentiousness and censoriousness has an obvious contemporary topicality, while the play’s broader exploration of the nature of justice is perennially relevant: at the Globe, the production is part of a season under the umbrella theme of “Justice & Mercy.”

Studying Injustice

A new book from Eric Heinze, Queen Mary, University of London. Here is the description from the publisher's website.

The Concept of Injustice challenges traditional Western justice theory. Thinkers from Plato and Aristotle through to Kant, Hegel, Marx and Rawls have subordinated the idea of injustice to the idea of justice. Misled by the word’s etymology, political theorists have assumed injustice to be the sheer, logical opposite of justice.

Heinze summons ancient and early modern texts, philosophical and literary, with special attention to Shakespeare, to argue that injustice is not primarily the negation, failure or absence of justice. It is the constant product of regimes and norms of justice. Justice is not always the cure for injustice, and is often its cause.

Selected Table of Contents

Introduction;  1. Nietzsche’s Echo; PART ONE: Classical Understandings; 2. Injustice as the Negation of Justice; 3.Injustice as Disunity; 4. Injustice as Mismeasurement; PART TWO: Post-Classical Understandings; 5.Injustice as Unity; 6. Injustice as Measurement; 7. Measurement and Modernity; Works Cited.

About the Author

Eric Heinze is Professor of Law and Humanities at Queen Mary, University of London. His most recent publications on legal theory have appeared in Oxford Journal of Legal Studies, Ratio Juris, International Journal of Law in Context, Legal Studies, Journal of Social & Legal Studies, Canadian Journal of Law and Jurisprudence, Law & Critique, Law & Literature, and Law & Humanities.

Published October 2012| 232 pages | Hardback: 978-0-415-52441-4| $120.00 $96.00

                                    For more information, please visit: www.routledge.com/9780415634793

Use discount code ERJ94 to save 20% off when you order online.

Rob.Kistler@taylorandfrancis.com

*  discount valid on hardback and paperback formats only orders@taylorandfrancis.com

A New Book On Justice and Injustice

New from Routledge



The Concept of Injustice
By Eric Heinze
Published October 24th 2012 by Routledge--218 pages

The Concept of Injustice challenges traditional Western justice theory. Thinkers from Plato and Aristotle through to Kant, Hegel, Marx and Rawls have subordinated the idea of injustice to the idea of justice. Misled by the word’s etymology, political theorists have assumed injustice to be the sheer, logical opposite of justice. Heinze summons ancient and early modern texts, philosophical and literary, with special attention to Shakespeare, to argue that injustice is not primarily the negation, failure or absence of justice. It is the constant product of regimes and norms of justice. Justice is not always the cure for injustice, and is often its cause.

Call For Papers--Critical Approaches To International Criminal Law

Call for Papers – Critical Approaches to International Criminal Law

The first conference on Critical Approaches to International Criminal Law, organised by the University of Liverpool School of Law and Social Justice, will take place on Thursday 6^th December and Friday 7th December 2012.

The field of International Criminal Law (ICL) has recently experienced a significant surge in scholarship, in institutions, and in the public debate. The contemporary debate is predominantly focussed on ICL’s contribution to projects of justice, peace, legality, addressing impunity and accountability. While there are individual sites of critique, they are largely limited to effectiveness arguments: If the International Criminal Court is not functioning as well as it could be, then it must be made more effective; if peace is not yet achieved through tackling impunity, then there must be more accountability. This limited critique has fostered a seemingly self-congratulatory, uncritical, and over-confident area of international law which has marginalised deeper critical approaches.

What is missing from the mainstream debate are the possible complicities of ICL in injustice, conflict, exclusions, and biases. Arguably, the numerous conferences this year on the topic of the 10-year anniversary of the coming into force of the Rome Statute are largely a testament to this limited critique. In this conference, we hope to shift the debate towards such complicities and limitations in the contemporary understanding of ICL. We hope to question some of the assumptions which inform the field and which may cause injustice, conflict, exclusion and bias.

Tentative sites of critique, which are envisaged as central to an idea of Critical Approaches to International Criminal Law (CAICL), are:

1.              ICL and the political

2.              ICL and individualism

3.              ICL and neo-liberalism

4.              ICL and ideology

5.              ICL and gender

6.              ICL and afrocentricism

7.              ICL crowding out other disciplines

8.              ICL and the emergence of a judiocracy

The first day of the conference is open to all and will take place at the International Slavery Museum in Liverpool. The second day will be a closed session including a writing workshop and an exchange of ideas on teaching CAICL; participation of this requires an invitation.

More information will be online shortly at: http://www.liv.ac.uk/law-and-social-justice/research/human_rights/index.htm

Please send abstracts of 500 words (max.) and a short bio (100 words max.) to C.Schwobel@liverpool.ac.uk by 01 September 2012. Selected speakers will be contacted by 28 September 2012. Draft papers will be due by 01 December 2012. A number of papers will be selected for an edited collection and/or a special issue. Completed papers will be due by end January 2013. The manuscript will be sent for consideration by March 2013.

A registration fee of £50 for academics and £100 for practitioners will be incurred. The registration fee income will go towards a travel grant for postgraduate students.

Literature and Intergenerational Justice

Elizabeth Markovits, Mount Holyoke College, has published Doddering Dotards and Brazen Ingrates: Archê and Finitude in Aristophanes, as an APSA 2012 Annual Meeting Paper. Here is the abstract.

Intergenerational justice has recently arrived (or resurfaced?) on the political theory scene in a big way. A number of scholars are trying to work out what we owe future generations in a general sense, while others are figuring out exactly what political rights children and not-yet-existing people may have. Yet almost all this work looks at the problem as a question of future generations, moving forward temporally to the generations after us, whether already born or not yet existing. In this paper, I want to engage in some looking backward: what are the demands of intergenerational justice when it comes to previous generations? While work on memory and historical injustice address some of the concerns here, I am specifically interested in still-existing generations, citizens who remain with us, but who are “past their prime” — that is, power has shifted to younger citizens. What does it mean to live in a temporal continuum, ceding power over what we have created to those who come after? How does our mortality figure into democratic freedom? While questions about old age obviously have moral import, there is also a political dimension. These are questions about power, how it circulates in a shared world, and how we can best temper its potentially destructive edges. To begin this exploration, I turn to Aristophanes and his use of the old man figure in Knights. In this work, Aristophanes presents a particular notion of old age, one that highlights its difficulties in a polity that demands youthful vigor. The essay then moves to Aristophanes’ portrayal of intergenerational dynamics in Clouds to probe the nature of these difficulties and what meaning they hold for democracy more generally. Because he so consistently draws upon the elderly figure, and because his work directly engages with the democratic life of Athens, Aristophanes provides readers with a wealth of material for thinking about the relationship between aging, democratic politics, and a robust sense of intergenerational justice.

Download the paper from SSRN at the link. 

Capers on Race and Justitia, the Symbol of Justice

Professor I. Bennett Capers has posted on SSRN an article, On Jusitita, Race, Gender, and Blindness, 12 Michigan J. of Race & Law 203 (2006):

If there is one image we associate with justice, it is of Justitia herself, blindfolded, balancing a scale in one hand, brandishing an unsheathed sword in the other. The image is so ubiquitous that we are often beyond noticing it. Late for court, late for class, or simply indifferent, we walk past it, barely glancing up.

This Essay – Justitia, Race, Gender, and Blindness – is about seeing Justitia and questioning how the image functions, both aesthetically and morally. Drawing upon law, literature, art history, and cultural studies, this Essay also problematizes Justitia. After all, what does it mean, connotatively and denotatively, for Justitia to be blind in a racialized society where color is so determinative? And conversely, what does it mean to fix a black gaze upon an image of justice that has been figured as white and female? The Essay contends that answering these questions is imperative for those of us who care about making our criminal justice system fairer, both in the way justice is meted out, and in our perception of justice.